Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #2 Entry

Much can change in two weeks. In a world of constancy, we are faced with what poets called mutability, the reminder that things always change. In small ways this spot in the backyard has been altered in two weeks; in large ways it is no different; in truth it is always the same.

A feeble winter has passed through southwestern Pennsylvania, as if Nature’s energy has been focused elsewhere. Like the parent of a run-away child whose focus wanes on three kids at home, the intensity cannot be evenly disciplined between two places at once. Somewhere winter storms rage, but here in Pittsburgh we waddle through puddles that would have been massive snowdrifts in Winter’s typical attention. It has been a rainy season.

The yard is muck – two weeks ago it was like standing on a moon-surface snow. The crackle beneath the feet would have deterred a criminal in action. Now the heels sink into a trap of sludge, each step a sqa-woosh-pluck-glosh of sound as the boot holds, pops out, lifts up.

The snow has melted yet the yard holds water across its surface in a green-brown soup waiting to be reheated. Pennsylvania clay, they say, is thick that way. Under two or three feet of tillable soil resides clumps of un-mouldable material, useless in all ways other than holding the Earth together. The clay is a barrier that slows filtration and fills my yard with tiny, melted pools. Eventually the water seeps through, down to a water table only geologists and construction workers worry about. Perhaps those who rely on well water are also concerned with levels and depths and natural streams as well. If that clay could be turned to statues and monuments, what yard would I have for my children to play upon? If crayons could be made or if pots and tableware were to be carved from Pennsylvania’s clump, then the snow-melt-January-rain would drip down to the center unimpeded and flow back to the rivers faster.

The air smells of comfortably pungent reserve, no mold, no festering, and yet not quite spring either. Rather, a hint of dry air evaporates the muddy trenches toward the jetstreams and reeks of scant, day-old moisture. The invisible transformation continues before my very eyes. The sun is engaged in the battle, and like a divorce lawyer watching over custody hearings, it too has a say over which water will go to the clouds and which will sink deep into the folds of the planet.

The runaway child drips into the aquifer as the remaining three ascend toward the clouds; their paths will be different.

Here I stand, the last to rise up and follow Sky Mother, so tempted years ago by Father Dirt, and I wonder aloud about choices, about decisions made when we were too young to even know what decision was. The sister who disappeared into the dirt later returned, clean (sober and clean as they say) and seemed worse for the ware. The others rolled into thunderstorms and violent squalls of their own, as I rode the misty forgiveness of soft spring rains. We were kids then, and this yard was our grandparents’ who have now gone on to be amongst that clay, as has the father who lost a custody battle he didn’t wish to fight. It is my yard now, and I can’t help but think that Pap-pap didn’t have to wait for it to drain, nor do I remember standing water at his house. As nature changes, life holds the scars.